Robot wrestling has come a long way. We are not very far away from real-life Voltron, I am confident.   [via digg.]       

I’ve owned an aluminum Powerbook G4 for some time now. I traded in my Titanium in February of ’04. For the most part, it has been an incredible machine, and still performs very, very well. Two weeks before I left for Dubai, my Airport card just stopped working. It stopped showing up in the control [...]

Expect some screwiness for a little while. I am going to install WordPress 2.02 and hope for the best. Wish me luck. UPDATE: Success.

I finally got around to walking down to the Dubai Museum this past weekend. It was pretty great, except maybe for the weirdo mannequins. You’ll see what I mean when you check out the photos I took on Flickr. (Sorry, but even with megaproxy, I can’t easily organize my photos, tag them properly, or sort [...]

Won’t you please join in me in wishing Mr. DiClerico and very Happy Birthday! Ευτυχή γενέθλια! (Little something to remind you Astoria, NY)

It recently came to my attention that atheists are the least trusted group in the United States. That is, “Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, homosexuals and other groups as “sharing their vision of American society.” Americans are also least willing to let their children marry atheists.” In other words, not good. Trusted below [...]

It looks like Khoi Vin’s capable hands have already had a major impact at NY Times.com. The homepage is redone – looks a little like The Onion, and interior pages  are fantastic. For those of you who DON’T know, Khoi is a brilliant designer and founder of Behavior. They recently redesigned The Onion to many [...]

Every single time I run spellcheck, it wants to replace “DiClerico” with “nonclerical.” I should probably just add “DiClerico” to the dictionary, but I kind of like the suggestion…

Well, wasn’t that a thoughtful and personal gift for my birthday. A little touch of home in the form of food, and design, and fruity flavored beverages. Thank you so much. A Pakistani man delivered the box and mumbled something thickly accented and indiscernible. I imagine now that it was Hindi for, “You are an [...]

One of my new friends, Hind, turns out to be an absolutely fantastic Lomo photographer. Some of her work is on display here in Dubai, and I hope to go see it this week. She shoots with an Actionsampler and Colorsplash, and I don’t know what else. I also have those cameras, but I barely [...]

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure of attending my first-ever polo match. It’s just as pretentious and wealthy and stuffy as you might imagine, but getting completely pissed off your ass is a great leveler. I DID actually watch some polo being played, and I still have no real idea what is going on. My [...]

I hate it when network TV can make me laugh this hard. 35 faceballs in 32 seconds is brilliant. Fucking ABC. (I really wanted to see 35 testicle kicks in 32 seconds… Anyone?) [via screenhead.]

Over the last few days, I have been making some subtle changes to the organization of this site, mostly around how the sidebars work on various pages. My goal was to have the the sidebars be as context sensitive as possible, with the right information at the right time. I hope it seems less random [...]

iAlertU is a sweet, sweet, (though mostly useless) application for use on motion sensor enabled MacBook Pros, that simply adds a cool motion detector alarm system. Once activated, if somebody moves the MacBook, a screeching alarm sounds. Before watching the video below, I hoped to myself that the developer would have had the inspiration to [...]

I wrote about Faith back almost two years ago now, when I was completely impressed with her “special” skills. Well, Montel Williams has finally caught on and did a segment with her on his show that is now up on YouTube. Trust me, you MUST watch this. According to Rob who sent this to me [...]

It’s 2:30am here in Dubai and I can’t sleep. I’ve got to be up in 3 1/2 hours, and I am sitting here surfing the restricted internet and listening to stolen music. Just downloaded and heard Massive Attack’s “Live With Me.” Good track. It’s not insomnia as much as bad sleeping habits. Today’s was the [...]

These are the English speaking satellite TV channels I have: EuroNews France: Useless news. [CH. 23] Viva Polksa Music: Some US music videos. [CH. 49] Bloomberg: US financial news. [CH. 63] Music Nation: Mostly english music videos. [CH. 77] Fashion TV: Rarely english, but always hot. [CH. 142] BBC World: BBC World news, in english. [...]

I am very excited about the new documentary Shinobi – Winds of the 34 Generations. It’s a historical look at the origins and legacy of ninjitsu and its practitioners, from the ancient assassins and their terrible legend, to the modern day martial artists that keep the art alive. I ordered the DVD and a poster [...]

These hand-built, Japanese, Rube Goldberg-esque machines accomplish nothing in the most extraordinary ways. Reminds me of the incredible Honda Cog ad we talked about three years ago. This video is a must watch.

Happy Easter. [thanks Matt.]

Last night’s Dubai Jamiroquai concert was really very good. Much thanks to Katie Kitten who proved the extra ticket and the company. Started off at a great bar in Media City Radisson called Media Lounge. Will definitely go there again. Between the bar and concert, I saw more attractive people than I have seen during [...]

This is an old one that never gets old. My parents sent me this. Happy Easter. (They don’t really have easter here…)

Oh man, I am a greedy, greedy monster. I have added more ads to this website, now on the homepage! It’s actually an experiment. I am not expecting to make any real money here, and I’ll probably get rid of many of the ads when I learn something interesting. So far in a week or [...]

I hate posts with little or no information, so I am sorry already for passing this along. But, I think this music video is for an artist I’ve never heard of called Sia. The song is called Breathe Me. And the video was apparently shot with a Poloroid camera, 2500 shots, produced by Astralwerks. The [...]

This video is an outstanding 49 minute interview/documentary with Dr. Richard P. Feynman, Nobel prize winning physicist, safe-cracker, artist, bongo player, prolific letter writer, teacher, and personal hero of mine. We’ve written about him here before, but for those of you who don’t know him, this interview is a great introduction. I am currently about [...]

I have been planning to write up a post about essential Mac software for a little over a week. A friend of mine is new to Mac and just bought a MacBook Pro. He is, of course, asking me many questions about software, and “how do I do this?” and “How do I do that?” [...]

This little animation was made by Iain Anderson using only freely available, standard, airport signage symbols. I love it. [via drawn.]

The other day after work, I had the enormous pleasure of following good directions to a nearly-ancient, still active ship building yard along Dubai Creek. Of course, these are no ordinary ships. These are wood-construction Dhow, enormous cargo carrying ships, still made entirely by hand (with the help of some cranes) without any modern construction [...]

It’s nice to see Japan turn back to its film roots. No, I don’t mean Godzilla, I mean the giant flying turtle, Gamera. This trailer for the new film, Gamera 2006, opening in Japan on April 29th, looks stunningly great and retarded at the same time. Free Willy meets ET meets Godzilla. I will do [...]

I downloaded Obie Trice‘s new album today after hearing the new single on the radio here in Dubai. I have no idea if this is old news in the states, or really a sweet new find. In either case, this new track called “Snitch”, featuring Akon, is absolutely fantastic. The rest of the album is [...]

I had my heart set on a new Volkswagen GTI when I got back to the states. I still love it, don’t get me wrong. But I recently saw some unofficial “official” photos of the new BMW 3 series and thought that it looked interesting. Well, now that I have seen this official unveiling, I [...]

Can I get a quick show of hand? Does anyone actually read or check out the links I put up on the sidebar of the site. It’s powered by my Del.icio.us account, and I would be saving them all anyway, so it makes sense to just output them here. But I get the feeling they [...]

This is a test of a new bullet syle. How is this looking? I need to play with the indentation. OK aaaaah. How come nobody mentioned to me that this site looks all fucked up in Internet Explorer? I think it’s time to crack open this CSS, originally from the Kubrick theme, but wholly bastardized [...]

Along with the 3-series coupe, this week BMW unveiled the “Clever”, a 2-seat, 3-wheeled concept vehicle, enclosed, and safe, crash-tested and airbagged, and absolutely gorgeous. I LOVE it. The article claims it is, “expected to cost around $10,000 and would have a top speed of 50 mph” and an expected 188 MPG! The coolest part [...]

Fantastic ad for Playstation. [via kotaku.]

A heavily, heavily edited version of Van Wilder is on TV right now, on MBC 2, the local movie channel. This is back before Tara Reid got a massive breast job and turned into a total train wreck. I am watching it just to see how much they edited. In particular, I am curious about [...]

I posted a shitty GDC video of the trailer for the sequel to God of War a few weeks back. They finally released the full version to the public, and it’s even better than I thought. As I said before, the first game was one of the best action games I’ve ever played, and this [...]

A guy named Paul Robertson has put together an absolutely amazing short animation completely in pixel art, in style of old-school NES side scroller games like Double Dragon and Metal Slug, stuffed full of anime style and pop culture references like cameo appearances by Christopher Walken, Walter from the Big Lebowski, and Mario. It’s called [...]

No, not the excellent TV show I have recently become addicted to. I have been downloading and catching up on episodes regularly, and I am almost up-to-date. The LAST thing in the world I want is for somebody to let something out of the bag. I DO NOT want to know. No, I mean “lost”, [...]

Aside form getting lost yesterday, I had another rude awakening to life in Dubai. I have never even heard of this happening to anyone in the history of modern plumbing… My apartment ran out of COLD water. That’s right. The water that just comes out of the ground…gone. The faucets turned on, the shower had [...]

Sometimes I am completely surprised by the things I haven’t blogged. So surprised, in fact, that I search for hours on my own site, swearing it is there, looking for the obscure reference to the thing that I’ve known was cool, or funny, or important for so long. Sometimes I find that I neglected to [...]

Up all night… long story. Wrote this. For years and years I searched for a decent backup software for Mac. Because I was never able to find anything that did what I wanted it to do (I’ll explain in a second) I mostly backed up manually, and very infrequently. This is a bad, bad practice. [...]

Popurls.com is a brilliantly useful new site that aggregates the most popular links, videos, photos, etc, from ALL of the major aggregation sites. It’s a beautifully designed aggregator of aggregators. When I say all, I mean ALL. On one page, they manage to squeeze, in a very organized way, the most popular links from DIGG, [...]

These college kids perform the first level of Super Mario Bros. live on stage, complete with music, sound effects, and power-ups. It is simply too entertaining for anyone who’s ever played through this classic of classics. [via everyone.]

TV and movies are scarce in Dubai and I am getting desperate. Other than the stuff I download from bittorrent (The Ultimate Fighter, The Shield, Sopranos, Family Guy, Lost) all English Dubai TV is bland crap from network TV and heavily edited movies from 4 years ago. In the early evenings I sometimes wait anxiously [...]